Tag: Wallpapers

Bing’s approach for its home page has been tremendously successful. Not only do the users love it, Google is even accused of trying to copy it for a short bit. the only thing users aren’t too happy about is the lack of any feature to search and view all the past wallpapers in a neat tool. Well, Bing has just launched a visual search gallery for all the previous wallpapers.

The visual search gallery is extra-ordinarily organized and lets you get to the desired image within seconds. The top row displays filters based on regions such as Asia, Europe or North America, while a series of filters on the left let you narrow down your results even further. These include filtering results by country, regional groups, categories, sub-categories, colors and even seasons.

The images can be sorted by date or by name and each thumbnail includes the date of the wallpaper and the location of the image. Clicking on any image displays a larger picture along with the ability to zoom in/out of the image and more information about the venue/subject of the picture. There is also an option to browse through some of the editor’s picks as well as viewing all the past wallpapers on the same screen. The gallery is part of Bing’s visual search beta that allows users to search through images rather than using text.

If you are interested in downloading Bing wallpapers, here is an excellent tool that downloads the fresh Bing wallpaper every day and make it your desktop wallpaper.

The Indian Rupee Symbol which was decided yesterday has been liked by many and disliked by many. However, it now gives Indian currency an official way to be represented just like dollars and the pound. Many people have liked the new symbol, whereas several have disliked it too.

If you are someone who has like the new Indian Rupee Symbol, you can now decorate your desktop with some cool wallpapers which make use of the Indian Rupee Symbol. The Indian Rupee symbol is made up of the Devanagari "Ra" and Roman capital "R" without the stem.

Here are some cool looking Indian Rupee Symbol wallpapers which you can download and set as your desktop background. To download these Indian Rupee Symbol Wallpapers, visit this link and right click on the images and save it to your PC.

[Windows Only] Those of you who are using Windows 7 may already be familiar with the awesome built in wallpaper (background) switcher. It allows you to choose a set of wallpapers and set them up so that they change at certain time intervals. You might want the wallpaper to change once a day or once every hour.

Actually, the only reason I call it an awesome feature is that it’s built right into the Windows settings. There have been third-party applications around, long before Win7, that allowed you to switch wallpapers as needed. Keith has written about one of them here.

Sometime after Keith wrote that piece, I saw a comment from one of our readers. Mitchell McKenna wrote: I recommend John’s Background Switcher. Let’s you bring in photos from facebook, picasa, etc. to use in backgrounds as well.

I’ve taken a look at John’s Background Switcher (JBS for short), and I have to agree with Mitch. It’s far better than any wallpaper switcher I’ve tried before. Here’s a brief list of the functions in it.

You can choose to display:

Individual pictures on your computer.

Folders containing pictures on your computer such as My Pictures’.

Flickr photo sharing selecting pictures by person, tags, sets or just plain random. You never know what you’re going to get next!

If you get tired of seeing the same old wallpapers on your Windows desktop, John’s Background Switcher may be the best solution for you. I have to rate it highly recommended, because I haven’t seen anything that does as much or does it any better.

[Windows Only] Media Spider is free portable tool that helps you download pictures from Google Images, Devian Art and 4Chan. The tool supports batch downloading of images from the above mentioned websites. Media Spider uses tabs for the 3 websites with relevant options for each of them.

Google Images : Google images can be searched based on a particular search string, number of image results, image size, image offset and whether or not adult.

Devian Art : To download images from Devian Art you have to define the following attributes,

Search string

Category

Sort by popularity over time

Number of Results

Image offset

Account details

4Chan : This uses a very simple search by category with no need of using any particular search string.

With all options properly configured, press the Search or Download (for 4Chan) button to start the download. You will be asked to locate the download location of the images during the first run. From the next run the last downloaded location will be used.

Techie-Buzz Verdict :

Media Spider is an open source project and hence lot of improvements are yet to come. The portability makes it more handier for people who prefer to download lots of images at one go. The tool can be used by any PC user.

There are currently several programs that let even novices create abstract wallpapers without prior knowledge of complicated design tools. These programs have friendly interfaces and are generally rather easy to use. In one of my previous posts, I had talked about the wallpaper creator tool by X3Studios, which lets you create abstract vector-based wallpapers. Now, if you have a weakness for abstract fractal-like wallpapers, then you will find the free Flash-based Flame nothing short of addictive!

Compared to X3Studios, Flame does not provide you with as many options. Yet, there is tremendous potential for variety within its limited options. You have either a black or a white background, and are also provided with a brush tool which can be customized. Apart from color, saturation and opacity, you can even adjust other options such as size, softness, chaos and noise to change the nature of your brush strokes. All that you have to do to create fractal-like shapes and doodles is move your mouse around!

The trick lies in exercising control over your mouse movements. For smoothly flowing sheer color strokes, it is best to move your mouse quickly without keeping it in one spot for too long. Slow mouse movements simply translate into a harder, more intensely focused color, which may not be a bad thing if that is what you’re aiming at in the first place.

Finally, once you deem your masterpiece completed, you can save your artwork to your computer. There is, however, one rather crucial limitation. Your wallpaper can only be saved at a resolution of 1680 Ã— 1050 pixels.

In spite of this, you can easily find yourself whiling away your time with Flame, enthralled by the sheer diversity present in every entrancing endeavor of yours!

Here, I have shared a couple of wallpapers that I made using Flame and would love to see the ones you create! I hope you have as much fun as I did!

March 2010 is here, and like every month, Smashing Magazine has released a new set of wallpapers for March 2010. The wallpaper calendars for the month of March 2010 are really awesome and definitely worth download.

Users can choose to download individual wallpapers, which are available in high resolution with the calendar and without the calendar. You can also download widescreen wallpapers individually.

You can also download the March 2010 Windows 7 theme and install it to get all the wallpapers with the theme. Check below for the Wallpaper and Windows 7 theme download links.

If you’re new to KDE4 or KDE for that matter, you might be a little bit lost in trying to customize it, especially when it comes to themes and wallpapers. Here’s how you can change them.

Right-click on the desktop and left-click “Desktop Activity”

Desktop Activity

Desktop settings opens up.

Desktop Settings

From the above screenshot – you’ll see two options – open, and Get New Wallpapers. By clicking on Open you can browser to the directory where all your images are stored, select it and set it as your wallpaper.

Select the required wallpaper

Once you’re chosen your required wallpaper, hit apply, and your selected image will be set as the wallpaper.

Selected wallpaper is set

If you don’t have too many wallpapers on your system, or prefer getting some excellent wallpapers from outside sources, KDE4 provides a neat way to get and install them. At the Desktop Settings screen, click on the Get New Wallpapers button.

KDE 4.4 Get Hot New Wallpapers

You’ll get the Plasma Addon installer screen. The screen gives you various options to get your desired wallpaper. You can sort by highest ratings, downloads, most popular, or just enter a search criteria of your own. Once you’ve selected your wallpaper, just click on the Install button, and the wallpaper will be ready to be installed.

Choose your wallpaper

Hit the close button to head back to the previous screen. You’ll see that the wallpaper is available, just select it, and hit Apply. Your new wallpaper is ready!

Your new wallpaper is ready!

Let us have a look at how you can change themes. Like wallpapers, you can change themes by downloading from the Internet or by using the Get Hot New Stuff interface. We’ll use the Get Hot New Stuff interface. The screen for changing themes is a bit hidden, we’ll have to goto Desktop settings (read: Personal Settings / Configure Desktop) first. Once there, click on Appearance.

Desktop Settings

Once in Appearance, click on Styles and Workspace tab. Then proceed to click on Get New Themes.

Get new themes

Select a theme which you like, and click on the install button. Then click on close to go back to the theme selection screen. Click on the theme and click Apply. That’s it, your new theme is installed!

If you want to change individual aspects of the theme, mix and match best elements of multiple themes, head back to Personal Settings, and click on the Advanced tab, and from there select Desktop Theme details

Desktop Theme Details

Once in, mix and match and customize till you’re happy with the final results!

We all love to personalize our computers to our taste, right? And the first step towards doing just that is putting up a great wallpaper! While it can be a lot of fun to surf through websites which offer loads of wallpapers for free download, after a lot of searching we often end up wishing for something a little more attuned to what we had in mind. The solution to this is simple: why not make your own wallpaper?

Abstract vector-based wallpapers are great ways to make your computer look more like an extension of your personality and X3Studios makes their creation extremely simple! With their free wallpaper creation tool, you would neither require Illustrator nor need to scour the web to build up a collection of stock images before you start work.

With the X3Studios tool, which you don’t even need to register for, your web browser will serve as your workstation (or play-station, if you, like me, find such creative work nothing short of fun). There will be a palette and element selection guide in the workspace set up in your browser and you will have free reign over all the numerous background textures and abstract design elements to do as you please with! All the elements selected by you can be customized with the help of the sliders on your right that let you play around with brightness, color, saturation as well as element size and spatial orientation.

X3Studios scores over other image-editing software such as Adobe Photoshop with its extremely simple user interface which makes life easier for all the novices out there who would like to try their hand at something like this without feeling intimidated by the software!

To top it all, the wallpaper that you create can be downloaded at high resolutions ranging from 1024×768 to 1600×1200.

Lastly, you can also turn to the wallpapers saved by others for inspiration as well as download purposes. So go on ahead and let your creativity stretch its wings and take hold of your computer! Below is a glimpse of the one I created. Have fun making yours!

While I was reading a newsletter from Dave’s Computer Tips, I found a link to a site that he recommended. The site is called VLADSTUDIOand it contains Desktop Wallpapers, E-Cards, T-shirts, Post cards, Greeting cards and Mugs.

The wallpapers are free and most of them are original artwork that is unique and wonderful. There are a few of the standard natural landscapes, but I can promise that many of you have never seen these wallpapers before. Below are thumbnails of a few that I found interesting.

Did I mention that there are over 650 free wallpapers in various sizes? The site is easy to navigate but there are only 24 wallpapers on each page, so be prepared to do plenty of clicking. I had no trouble spending over an hour there the first time I visited.

Vladstudio is the creation of 30 year old Vlad Gerasimov, from Irkutsk, Russia, and located near lake Baikal, the deepest lake in the world. If you want to learn more, see this interview of Vlad. If you really like Vlad’s work, and want to give him a shout-out, here is Vlad’s Twitter page.